Costa Rican Creatures

The first morning we woke up in Costa Rica, I walked out on the balcony and screeched in my sickly voice, “Steve! There is a creature out here! Get the camera!”

I swear to you, I’m going to share stories of our time in Costa Rica. I have several posts partially written, but there is just so much to tell that it’s overwhelming. I don’t want the important stuff to get lost in all of the elaborate details that keep pouring onto the computer screen despite my best efforts to remain tame. While I try to get a hold of myself, feast your eyes on these Costa Rican Creatures.

This is the first creature we saw. It’s a some type of Costa Rican raccoon. It had a bizarre name, but for the life of me, I can’t remember it.

He lived at Arenal with his friends. We saw up to ten of them at a time. These pictures are a bit rough because the sun wasn’t quite up and the could cover was dense as all get out.

Despite this picture, they were not shy at all. In fact they were quite bold and really didn’t care that we were examining their activities.

The restaurant at Arenal Observatory Lodge has a huge observation desk, and each morning they put fruit out on the feeders to bring in the birds.

All different species of birds come for breakfast each morning. We literally have hundreds of pictures of birds.

This was Steve’s favorite bird. It had a gorgeous voice. In the jungle you don’t hear cars, planes or other evidence of human life, instead you hear birds, frogs and monkeys. They talk all day and all night, but they are the loudest at sunrise. Even in the pouring rain, they keep on chattering.

Don’t you wish you could bottle that green up and use it to decorate your house?

And isn’t this blue to die for?

And how about this purple guy?

Arenal Observatory Lodge also attracts this rare creature, the Bird Snob. About a dozen Bird Snobs inhabbited the Lodge while we were there. All of them had big honking cameras with all the bells and whistles, and all of them were hellbent on getting pictures of these birds without the “tacky bird feeders” in the frame. I’m not joking; it was serious business. They were all in a tiff because they couldn’t get many shots that looked like they were “in the wild.” I don’t know about you, but for me, it doesn’t get much wilder than literally sitting in the middle of the jungle.

Back to the birds.

Steve took no less than 50 pictures of this hummingbird. He was determined to get a picture of this guy in action. I think he didn’t pretty good since we didn’t have a Bird Snob camera.

This guy lived on our balcony at Arenal.

This guy, we met in the lobby of  the Hilton Papagayo Resort. He and Steve duked it out a bit. It was kind of like watching a cat swat at yarn – the creature being the cat and Steve being the yarn.

AND this guy was chilling on outside of our hotel room, like RIGHT outside. We were sitting outside chatting with our friend (we’ll call her E), and she goes, “That stick is moving… Oh. My. God. It’s a snake.”

While E and I were backed up against the wall, Steve was less than a foot away from this dude taking his picture. He was more docile than the mantis was, but he did get annoyed and slithered away into the bush after awhile.

We saw monkeys in the jungle, but we didn’t have our camera on us. There were several of them lazing around in the tree tops. They sounded like giant angry dogs. We also saw some monkeys in a cage. A capuchin monkey and I had a run in. Some friends of ours paid to go inside a cage of monkeys; we did not. You should see how feisty those little guys are, the raccoon in their cage got roughed up right before everyone went in. Anyhow, I was standing next to the cage and this little capuchin and I were checking each other out. I guess he didn’t appreciate me looking away from him to talk to someone because he yanked my hair and came away with a fistful. Our romance ended there, but he sure was cute.

Prev Post -> It’s Important that Mommies Sleep Next Post -> Moanna at the Hotel